JUNETEENTH 2023

A collection of essays, first published in 1903, in which the author examines the role, influence, and perceptions of African-American men and women in turn-of-the-century society. Includes a chronology of the author's life, explanatory notes, and critical commentary.

Across a turbulent history, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people voice their passionate...

Americans like to insist that we are living in a postracial, color-blind society. In fact, racist thought is alive and well; it has simply become more sophisticated and more insidious. And as historian Ibram X. Kendi argues, racist ideas in this country have a long and lingering history, one in which nearly every great American thinker is complicit. Kendi chronicles the entire story of anti-Black racist ideas and their staggering power over the course...

"October 2016 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Black Panther Party. Photojournalist Bryan Shih, who has been interviewing and taking portraits of the surviving Panthers around the country for years, has partnered with Yohuru Williams, dean and history professor at Fairfield University, to deliver the definitive celebration of the Black Panthers. Part oral history, part scrapbook, this is a beautifully produced book of forty-five...

Following the abolition of slavery in New England, white citizens seemed to forget that it had ever existed there. Drawing on a wide array of primary sources-from slaveowners' diaries to children's daybooks to racist broadsides-Joanne Pope Melish reveals not only how northern society changed but how its perceptions changed as well. Melish explores the origins of racial thinking and practices to show how ill-prepared the region was to accept a population...

The story of the enslaved West Indian women in the struggle for freedom Enslaved West Indian women had few opportunities to record their stories for posterity. Yet from their dusty footprints and the umpteen small clues they left for us to unravel, there's no question that they earned their place in history. Pick any Caribbean island and you'll find race, skin colour, and rank interacting with gender in a unique and often volatile way. In A Kick in...

"National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time. In light of recent tragedies and widespread protests across the nation, The Progressive magazine republished one of its most famous pieces: James Baldwin's 1962 "Letter to My Nephew,"...